Lightly modified; original by hobvias sudoneighm (Flickr: striatic)With the rise of the cloud, and the expected future of autonomous systems, we will start to need advertising to computers. That is, a system may want to buy itself increased capability, or buy its humans goods or services based on calculated needs.
There is an important question of what computer-targeted advertising would look like. It seems entirely plausible that the advertising industry is not equipped to deliver compelling advertisements for computers. Traditional advertisements rely heavily on appeals to emotion and cultural triggers.
Computer Ads for Computer Needs
So the first type of advertising for computers is selling them things they need. More storage space, software upgrades, that sort of thing. Computers will likely only want to know the specifications of their potential purposes, eliminating the need for stylized advertising and flowery language.
They may want more data than many vendors currently deliver. Computers will want to more heavily study production quality and vendor reputation, at least for components or upgrades that are critical to their continued operation (e.g., for a cloud-based backup the computer may want to know about dependability, but also lock-in costs more than a human would).
The other factor here is that as computers do begin to engage in commerce, it is expected that services themselves will begin to cater to computers. Instead of building products that appeal to IT managers or individual humans, the products will be designed to fit the computer’s needs. The marketing schtick will fall by the wayside, as will value-added items like training services.
Finally, computers will also want to advertise themselves to other computers. If they have extra resources, they will want to use them for offsetting their own costs, for example. Or they might do volunteer work, like testing software they use for bugs, in their spare time.
Computer Ads for Fulfillment of Human Needs
The second type of advertisement for computers involves telling computers about products and services that they will buy on behalf of humans. This sort of advertising will be much harder to nail down. Will a human tell their computer they want edgy or fashionable items when available? Will the computer recognize when the products offered to it are being skewed based on data mining?
It seems plausible that computers will gain some ability to seek out occasional alternatives to consumable products, to give humans the opportunity to try to switch between alternatives. Marketing materials will likely shift to try to trigger that mechanism more frequently.
If you are buying Foo™ Food and only trying alternatives every six months or when the cost of an alternative saves you 10% or more, Bar™ Food might try to figure out your computer’s alternatives cadence, and then hit it with a 10% discount the next month, to see if a double-period of the alternative convinces you to switch brands. Of course, other factors besides an alternative schedule and price discount may be used to determine computed purchasing decisions.
The other side of that is that computers may find novel ways to avoid price discrimination. This might take the form of pre-shipment secondary markets where one computer buys an item and resells it to another at a slight markup but relative discount to the advertised price.
Ad-blocking Computers?
Would computers see any value in blocking advertisements? Given they do not have the same attention deficits as humans, it is unlikely. If other constraints compel it, they will, but otherwise computers seem like great candidates for honest advertising.